Antonieta Villamil in documentary Voices in Wartime: The role of poets during time of war
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=KBU9MVZN4PA
Voices In Wartime - 12 Minute Preview
Voices in Wartime is a feature-length documentary (56-minute or 74-minutes) that sharply etches the experience of war through powerful images and the words of poets -- unknown and world-famous. Soldiers, journalists, historians and experts on combat interviewed in Voices in Wartime add diverse perspectives on war's effects on soldiers, civilians and society. In Voices in Wartime, poets around the world, from the United States and Colombia to Britain and Nigeria to Iraq and India, share their views and experiences of war that extend beyond national borders and into the depth of the human soul.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END MUST BE ENDED, AND THE BEGINNING OF
THE MIDDLE OF THE END IS NOW. —Wilfred Owen.
No matter how significant Poets Against War was, it’s still
a tiny movement, in comparison to world history. This film is about the power
of poetry to explore the reality of war, the emotional essence of war and how is
experienced across borders from different perspectives. We have a lieutenant
general from West Point for example, we have a woman poet from Colombia who lost
her brother to disappearance, and we have a Vietnam veteran who returned from
the war to face thirty years of nightmares.
The idea is to help the audience understand war in a new
way. It is not going to change history to tell the story of Poets Against War.
What might change history is if people come to the next decision point about
whether to go to a war and they have a different point of view, because they
understand the reality of war at a deeper level.
The Role of Poets and the Iraq
War
This interview
was reproduced
from an interview for the film
What was the connection that you felt between
the disappearance of your brother and the war in Iraq?
The war in Iraq
made it feel very personal because I saw in it the pattern of the unfortunate
foreign policy of the United States repeated. With this war in Iraq I knew many
innocent people were going to be killed for something that from the beginning
was a lie.
I was very worried and
uneasy thinking that a country can go to another country and just basically
take away, by means of lying, their natural resources, which in this case is
oil. That happens in Colombia too.
Did you feel that you could do anything about
the United States invading Iraq?
I took to the
streets. I took to all the possibilities. I went to Answer; I went to meetings with Not
in Our Name, with Latinos Against War. We organized a big march in East L.A. I went to all the marches that I could. Prior
to the war in Iraq was 9-11 and we were left for a few months with our mouths
open thinking it just could not be true. It could not happen here. It was not
possible. It was as if a nightmare was repeating itself. I felt like I was back
on a street in a third world country. How could it be happening here?
Then everything started building up, and
building up to the war in Iraq. It was one mistake and one overlaying of
wording and stupid reasons after the other. It was unbelievable. You were
seeing these big, fat, unreal lies being built in front of our own noses and we
could not do anything about it. We felt so impotent. I could not believe that
we fell into this collective karma. How long did we think we could get away
with it?
How did you hear about Poets Against War?
I am a founder
member of Latinos Against War, where we were in contact with lots of people
that were against the war. I know many poets. I do not know Sam Hamill
personally but I knew Ram Devineni from Rattapallax Press in New York. We did
Dialog Among Civilizations and Poets Against Violence.
I organized a Poetry Marathon Against War in
Iraq in Los Angeles. Since the war in Iraq I’ve been writing a lot. I had all
these poems about my brother and other poems about the war in Colombia. I wrote
poems about different experiences of war and what it does to people. And I
write about the disappeared a lot. We are witnesses and how can we not write
that?
I started communicating
with a lot of people through the Internet and I sent the first poem I wrote in
English “My Name is Pedro” to Poets Against War and they published that poem.
When you sent your poem, did it make you feel
that something was happening?
Sending the
poem to Poets Against War and knowing
the stand that the poets took made me feel better. However, I knew that even if
we could not stop the war this is the place where poets should be. I felt this
is what we should be doing, even if at that point, this war was going to
happen. What we were doing was part of something bigger.
All the machinery put into creating this war
did not start a few months ago or since September 11. It started way before
that, because of many accumulated events. I knew that once the machine reached
that boiling point it was just the warmongers, the dogs of war letting the
people know that this is going to happen despite whatever you do.
That was very clear. For us it was just a way
of telling people what was happening and a way of saying no. This is what we
should be doing, saying NO.
What do you think is the role of the poet?
Poets are the critics of feelings and
experience. We do pretty much what the mathematicians do with numbers, but we
do it with language. Poetry for me is at the foundation of culture.
At this moment we are speaking of poetry but we
are also recording. We are recording a memory of the human experience that will
last a long time. That memory has to be into words first, of image and color,
and then our human experience takes off to a place in time and permanence.
I think poets are witnesses in charge of making
human experience permanent. One of the funny things about poetry is that you
will never see a bestseller poet. Maybe, after 50 to 100 years, you can make it
into the news, like Neruda. I feel very lucky if people hear a little bit of
that experience coming through me. You cannot help but to realize that what you
are writing, even though it may sometimes sound deep or dense, you are writing
for a child in the future. Children, for the poet, are the eyes into the
future. I hope that they will be reading
those poems when they are 40 or 50. I have seen poems change and help people’s
lives.
Is the role of writers and poets in Latin
America more vital than here in the United States?
The role of the
poet everywhere, not only in the United States but also in the rest of America,
and the world is to be the conscience of the culture, of the community; not
only by writing, but also by reading. There are many young poets performing their
poetry now because we have mass communication like radio and movies. That seems
to be getting people to listen to poets.
It is a
challenge but I think that poets resort to all kind of mediums. We collaborate
with painters, with musicians, with dancers, with filmmakers. Therefore, there
is this active, organic life of the writer and the poet within the community.
Besides that, many of the ideas for music, dance, film, visual art, etc, go
though a written form before you perform it in public.
What else can poets do?
Organize and be aware of their surroundings. One very important thing that poets can do is bring poetry from up in the clouds and put it on earth. Put jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt on poetry and send it walking the streets to notice what is going on in the present. I hope that poetry at that moment can find the same rhythm as that of the human breath.
The Conflict in Colombia
This interview
was reproduced
from the film Voices in Wartime.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I was born in Bogota, Colombia in 1962 in the
month of the comets. In the Chinese horoscope, I am a tiger. These are the
monkey years so usually tigers have a very slow difficult time in a monkey
year. I started dancing before walking and at ten years of age, I took on
poetry.
I just love words and
music. My father used to play a lot of music while I was in the womb. He always
played music in the morning, so I always woke up to music. I think that I noted
the rhythms. We talk in Colombia like Italians, very fast and when we talk, we
look like we are fighting. However, we are just talking.
Why did you leave Colombia?
I left
Colombia out of some kind of strange destiny, because I had to be here talking
with you today. One thing I was always glancing a little bit ahead into the
future, reading the signs around me. I became aware of all the injustices. I
knew that if I stayed I would have to go to the mountains or I would probably be
disappeared eventually like many activists. Deep inside I saw no other way. I
had a great feeling of running and running away. That is what I did.
Like a puzzle, I saw it unfolding, the pieces
one by one until I got out. I went to Miami. It has become the longest
vacation. Before I left Colombia I remember looking at every bird, every tree,
every street, at faces, houses, buildings, and I knew I was saying goodbye for
a very long time. I knew that I would never leave otherwise.
It is as if I left because I wanted to stay.
That was a way of surviving beyond and before it happened. I saw it coming and
I said that I was not going to let it happen to me, and I wanted to write
poetry. Poetry saved me.
Tell me about the conflict in Colombia.
The
conflict in Colombia started a very long time ago, more than 50 years ago.
Colombia is a very rich country. It is one of the richest countries in its
biodiversity. It has a lot of petroleum, 24-karat gold, and emeralds. It has
very rich soil. You throw into soil a seed and the next thing you see is a tree
with very sweet, exotic fruit.
It is a
country with a very long history of corrupted governments. All the rich land
and all the opportunities are in the hands of very few. You can just handle so
much humiliation, hunger, and lack of opportunities. What do you do with all
these frustrations, wanting to do what we would be able to do in a normal
environment?
People have to fight for
their rights and have to fight for justice. Until social justice is achieved in
Colombia, you can kill everyone and the situation is not going to change.
Hunger and injustice is like the sun; you cannot just put your finger up to
block it and then try to say see? It is not there. It will always be there
until justice is done.
This conflict is between the government and the
paramilitary groups in the countryside?
The conflict in Colombia
is very complicated. In the beginning, it was about people with few
opportunities fighting against government corruption. Then the middle and upper
classes that own all the land needed people to defend them, so along came a
group called the paramilitary. The government is a suspect of having ties to
the paramilitary. The military erases whole generations of people that have
leftist ideas about where the country should go.
Whole generations in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay,
Uruguay and Colombia disappeared in this way. Then the narco-traffickers appeared
and have ties to parts of the government. The guerrillas are suspect of having
ties to the narco-traffickers – not all of them, but enough to make the fight
very complex, then you lose your objective, your reason.
The guerillas say they defend the poorest
people who have been taken advantage of for over 100 years. Then where do you
draw the line? It is very complex. It is almost like we had our own Vietnam War
in Colombia.
Do people in America know about what is going
on in Colombia?
I don’t think that enough people in the United
States are aware of what’s going on. People are a little more aware lately with
the help of technology like e-mail and digital cameras that can capture certain
realities, but there are a lot of things that still seem like well kept
secrets. For example a lot of people don’t know that we have a School of the
Americas in Texas, which provides training to the military and mercenaries that
go all over Latin America in a witch hunt against people with left ideas. I
hope that more people will get to know because it is important to put a stop to
the School of the Americas. United States is Not America. America goes all the
way from Alaska to the Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. Central America and Mexico
are America. Colombia is America. The military trained in the School of the
Americas resort to the worst weapon that you can use against Civil Democracy
and the social unification of Latin America, which is disappearance against
people of leftist ideas. A conscientious democracy cannot exist without the
participation of either right or left. It is like allowing a giant to pick on
its own arms and legs or allowing the legs and arms to pick on its own brain.
And if we don’t take care of the fire in our neighbor’s house, our brother’s
house, it’s only a matter of time until it starts raining fire on our heads.
How has the political situation that you grew
up with in Colombia affected your poetry?
The political situation I
grew up in affects my writing, and I write about social content a lot. I also
write about love. However, when I write about love, even an erotic poem, I
speak of something that exists within a social context.
We are individuals, but we are also part of a
collective community. Everything that has to do with social issues influences
our individual lives. Love, things we see, daily life, is influenced by what is
going on around you.
Tell us about your poem “Letter To the Brother
That Went to War”.
That poem
had a different title: “What December 1990 Brought Us.” It is a poem written to
my brother. I changed the title because suddenly it was not only my brother but
our brothers and sisters – when I looked closely it was a whole generation that
was disappearing and with the war in Iraq it was clear that generation was
going to grow. We have to start serious investigation regarding the disappeared
in Colombia. There is a sickening silence around this theme in Colombia.
What was your brother like?
I am
very close to my brother. Pedro is his name, Pedro Villamil. I came to the
United States in 1984 and I promised him I was going to take him with me a
little later. I struggled here in the United States, coming to a new country,
to a completely different culture and a completely different language. For a
poet, that was a lot to take. Then I had to start putting it off. I did not see
my family for eight years. In the ninth year I lost him to disappearance.
Disappearance means we do not know where, we do not know how, we just do not
know. He went out one day, like anybody else, and never came back. He had no
reason to leave. He just never came back.
Do you think about Pedro a lot?
I have
dreams about him. I think that a family cannot recover from disappearance. Not
knowing what happened, not having a place to mourn.
My mother, Alicia is a very fervent Catholic.
She never wanted to give a mass in the church for him. We told her that we
probably ought to have a place in the cemetery for Pedro but she refused. She
said, no, Pedro is coming back one day.
He would
never have left my mother. Pedro was the kind of son that a mother dreams.
Always making her laugh, helping her. Mamma
you want this, but it broke, so I will fix it, do not worry. Pedro was
32-years old when he disappeared. He was the light of the house, the light of
my mother’s eyes.
What do you think happened?
When I
went back to Colombia I started asking friends and people I knew, about the
disappearance of my brother. I found myself not only asking about my brother
Pedro but also asking, “Where is Julieta? Where is Chaparro? Where is Juan?
Where is Maria? Where is Magdalena?
Where is…”
I was afraid to ask. I
was very afraid to ask because the answer was always the same. I realized it
was a whole generation.
The answer was always that the people disappeared?
Yes, or
it was, “So-and-so was tired of the corruption and what was going on and they
took up arms and went to the mountains. Or he was taken by the paramilitary. Or
he’s in jail. Her, she’s… we do not know. She disappeared. She went to the
corner just to buy bread and never came back. Last time we saw him was at a
party and these men that came in a car took him.” “Oh, and where is so and so?”
“Well, I think he’s somewhere in a country very far away.” Suddenly a whole
generation I knew was not there – they were all away or lost.
In this poem, does Pedro become a symbol of all
the people who have disappeared?
In the poem “My Name is Pedro” he is a symbol
of all the people disappeared in Central and South American countries. Pedro
died of this disappearance and it is not like other people you know who died of
cancer, or of AIDS, which is terrible. People who die suddenly, who go to sleep
and never wake up, so you can say he died of this or he died of that. But when
you don’t know, when you don’t find a place to go to mourn that loss, what did
they die of?
That is why I said Pedro
died of disappearance. He is in the long list of people that disappear every
day in Central and South American countries.
The first stanza, “What can I tell you dear
brother, mutilated in silence,” is so hopeless and so deeply sad. Were you
talking to your brother?
I feel like I am talking to my brother every
time I write about him. It is a way of communicating with him, with his memory.
A way to reconcile with the idea of not seeing him getting older, having
children…
Letter to the brother that went
to war
Listen to this poem: mp3 / windows media
Who is in the Voices in Wartime Film
 |
Chris Abani
Nigerian war survivor, human rights activist and refugee, author of three poetry collections and two novels, recipient of the 2001 PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Read the interview |
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Sinan Antoon
An Iraqi poet, novelist, filmmaker and translator, published a collection of poems Mawshur Muballal bil-Huroob (A Prism; Wet with War) and a novel, I`jam. Read the interview |
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Rachel Bentham
Poet and novelist from Bristol, England, is widely published in the small press. Her stories and dramas are often broadcast on the BBC. Read the interview |
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Sampurna Chattarji
Born in Africa, she is award-winning poet and short-story writer. Her work has appeared in Poetry India: Millennium Voices and 100 Poets Against the War, among others. She lives in Mumbai (Bombay), India. Read Chattarji's poetry |
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David Connolly
A poet who lives in South Boston and served with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Vietnam war. He is author of the poetry collection Lost in America. Read the interview |
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Emily Dickinson
1830-1886. Reclusive and influential Massachusetts poet. Read Dickinson's poetry |
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Ali Habash
Iraqi poet who lives in Baghdad. Read Habash's poetry |
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Pamela Talene Hale
Poet from Houston and Seattle. Read the interview |
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Sam Hamill
Author of many volumes of poetry, essays, and translations, co-founder of Poets Against the War, editor of Copper Canyon Press. Read the interview |
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Chris Hedges
A longtime New York Times war correspondent who covered conflicts in places such as El Salvador, the Balkans, and the Persian Gulf. He shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. He is author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Read the interview |
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Dominic Hibberd
Author of Wilfred Owen: A New Biography and several other books about poets and poetry of the First World War. He lives in the United Kingdom. Read the interview |
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Marie Howe
Poet and professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Read more |
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Langston Hughes
1902-1967. Eloquent and influential U.S. poet, essayist, playwright, storyteller, and activist for peace and social justice. Read Hughes' poetry |
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Randall Jarrell
1914-1965. U.S. poet, soldier, and control tower operator during the Second World War. His poetry book, Little Friend, Little Friend, bitterly and dramatically documented the intense fears and moral struggles of young soldiers. Read Jarrell's poetry |
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Lieutenant General William Lennox,
Jr.
Superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point. General Lennox, wrote his PhD dissertation on American war poetry. Read the interview |
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Peter Levitt
Poet, author, translator, and lifelong peace activist from the U.S., now living in British Columbia, Canada. Read Levitt's poetry and personal statement |
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Paul Mysliwiec
U.S. Army First Lieutenant who led his unit through the invasion and first months of occupation of Iraq in Spring 2003. Read the interview |
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Marilyn Nelson
Poet Laureate of Connecticut and professor at University of Connecticut Read Nelson's poetry |
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Wilfred Owen
1893-1918. Soldier poet and British Army officer during the First World War, killed in action a week before the Armistice in 1918. Read about Owen |
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Sherman Pearl
Poet and art activist who lives in Santa Monica, California. Read the interview |
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Jonathan Schell
The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent, and the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People and The Fate of the Earth. Read the interview |
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Siegfried Sassoon
1886-1967. Siegfried Sassoon served as a soldier in the British Army during the First World War. Known for his bravery in battle, he was a friend and mentor to fellow poet Wilfred Owen. Read about Sassoon |
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Hashim Shafiq
Iraqi poet who lives in Baghdad. Read Shafiq's poetry |
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Jonathan Shay
Psychiatrist for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs in Boston, Shay treats combat veterans with severe psychological injuries and is the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Read the interview |
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Jon Stallworthy
Well-known expert on war poetry at the University of Oxford and author of a biography of Wilfred Owen and editor of The Oxford Book of War Poetry. Read the interview |
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Todd Swift
Canadian poet, essayist, screenwriter and international literary activist, editor of 100 Poets Against the War published in Britain in March 2003. Read the interview |
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Antonieta
Villamil
Colombian poet, editor and translator. International Poetry Award "Gastón Baquero 2001" with her book Los Acantilados del Sueño. Read the interview |
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Emily Warn
Poet, teacher, and activist; author of The Novice Insomniac and three other collections of poetry; co-founder of Poets Against the War. Read the interview |
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Craig White
NBC cameraman embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division, one of the first U.S. Army units to enter Baghdad in April 2003, witness to a horrific firefight as he was trapped for hours under a bridge in Baghdad. Read the interview |
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Walt Whitman
1819-1892. Groundbreaking U.S. poet, writer, teacher, journalist, and Civil War nurse. He is the author of Leaves of Grass. Read Whitman's poetry |
Movies
Poetry personalizes war in riveting documentary
Seattle Times staff reporter
In the new documentary about war poetry and the trauma caused by armed conflict, "Voices in Wartime," U.S. Army 1st Lt. Paul Mysliwiec recites part of Alan Seeger's ominous World War I poem, "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," about the sacred duty of the warrior: And I to my pledged word am true / I shall not fail that rendezvous.
But in a contrasting segment, Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, makes a remark about soldiers that resonates in a completely different way: "In combat, men become each other's mothers."
The warrior as nurturer, tortured soul and poet. "Voices in Wartime," a symphony of war poems, taped interviews, graphic war footage and heartfelt analysis, clearly has an agenda, but perhaps not what one might expect.
The film sprang out of the Internet-based Poets Against the War movement of 2003, during the contentious run-up to the Iraq war.
Executive producer Andrew Himes, a former Microsoft web-page developer, wanted to make an anti-war film that capitalized on the debate sparked by that campaign, during which his friend, the poet and publisher Sam Hamill, organized writers and amateur scribes nationwide against the invasion. Himes set up the original Web site for that effort.
An avowed opponent of war who grew up in the racially polarized South and spent time there working as a civil-rights activist in the 1960s, the Internet-savvy Himes had used technology to expound on his views and encourage discussion, but he'd never contemplated making a film before this project came along.
Still, "it feels very organic and natural, because it's so connected to what I believe in," Himes said recently.
On Friday, more than two years after the Poets Against the War campaign and the start of the Iraq invasion, Himes' film opens at the Guild 45th Theatre in Wallingford, where he also lives.
The rollout of the $350,000 film, financed by Himes and other investors, has snowballed into a nationwide word-of-mouth campaign.
This winter, Himes used his Web site, www.voicesinwartime.org, to call on members of the public to hold "house parties" in homes and other settings to screen the documentary and discuss it afterward. The Web site includes a dialogue forum as well as writing samples from dozens of living contributors and past literary greats like Walt Whitman ("Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field") and Homer ("The Iliad").
A 230-page anthology, "Voices in Wartime" (Whit Press, $16.95), including verse and interview material that couldn't be used in the movie, is set for release May 1.
But the centerpiece is the film itself, which also premieres in cities such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York this month. The film rides a recent wave of moody, jaundiced depictions of war told through first-hand accounts, images and writing.
The recently released Iraq-war documentary "Gunner Palace," shot with U.S. troops in Baghdad, and the newer "Occupation: Dreamland," shot with troops near Fallujah, have both won critical acclaim for going beyond the politics of the Iraq war to the personal experience of fighting it.
"Voices in Wartime" is more of a meditation on the history of war and its emotional cost. It uses verse written through the ages to capture the nuances of war sometimes passed over in historical or journalistic accounts: What it feels like to kill, to witness the slaughter of comrades and to return home from war unable to mentally leave the battlefield.
From the earliest war poetry written in ancient Sumer (present-day Iraq) to esoteric verse from Emily Dickinson to bitter accounts penned by Iraqi poets after the American invasion two years ago, the film traces a well-trod path leading to the same age-old truth its two most recent predecessors reach in their own way — that war is hell for the soul as well as the body.
In this film, British poet Wilfred Owen's disillusionment over fighting in World War I rubs against the contemporary Colombian writer/activist Antonieta Villamil's anger and grief over the "disappearance" of her brother Pedro Villamil in that country's 50-year civil conflict.
The film, directed by Rick King, whose brother Jonathan King is a co-producer and close friend of Himes, is quietly yet assuredly anti-war, with a whole segment on the rise of Poets Against the War.
But its most transformative moments come from accounts of battlefield chaos and compassion told by those who've lived through it, from "shell-shocked" British soldiers during World War I to Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to weary soldiers fresh from the front lines in Iraq to haunted embedded journalists to the local victims of conflict.
The film cleverly employs the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Lt. Gen. William Lennox Jr., who just happened to write his doctoral dissertation on American war poetry, to drive home the theme of poetry as the ultimate medium for chronicling war's impact on humanity.
"We did not design it to be a political polemic," Himes said of the film. "Instead, I wanted it to be the kind of film I could talk about with all of my Republican relatives."
Independent Seattle film critic Warren Etheredge, founder of the online Warren Report movie site, commended "Voices in Wartime" for its nuanced, apolitical tone.
"What I appreciated about the film is the filmmakers' dedication to finding balance on a subject that can be painfully partisan," said Etheredge, who organized a house party screening of the film at the Seattle Art Museum last month. "It's putting great poetic spin on what is the tragedy of any war, from either side."
"I've watched so many left-leaning documentaries in the past year — and I am left-leaning — and even they can become distracting at some point," Etheredge explained.
"This is not another anti-Bush or anti-Iraq war movie," he added. " 'Voices in Wartime' " is as close to a 'Ken Burns' look at this movement as one can get, without Ken Burns."
Producing the film shifted, rather than reinforced, Himes' personal biases.
Before making the film, he said he didn't feel much sympathy for the people who fight wars.
But that comment about soldiers becoming each other's mothers, which equated the concern a soldier has for a comrade in harm's way to that of a mother for her child, opened his eyes to the warrior's complex point of view.
"I think for the first time in my life, I really got it," Himes said. "That phrase altered me, reading it in the transcript. I typed those words and I started crying. It helped me get a sense of profound compassion for soldiers in combat that I don't think I'd felt before.
"It didn't change my stance toward war, but it changed my stance toward soldiers."
When Himes described his transformation to a staunch anti-war activist during a house party screening organized by PoetsWest at the Penny Café in Ballard last month, the woman seemed less than impressed, even though she said she enjoyed the film on an artistic level.
But Stacy Bannerman, of Kent, whose husband, National Guard Sgt. Lorin Bannerman, just returned from Iraq where he led a mortar platoon near Baghdad, sees potential for films like "Voices in Wartime" to bridge the chasm between war opponents and troops that developed during the Vietnam era.
"That breach is being healed in a sense," said Bannerman, an anti-war activist who attended a screening of the film at the Seattle Art Museum last month. "The warrior needs to understand the peacemaker and the peacemaker must understand the warrior. Historically, we have not had a recognition that that was possible. This film shows us that it is possible."
"There is a grace and a beauty and an honor and a courage to people that sign up to serve this country — I didn't see it before," she said.
Of course, being married to a National Guardsman just home from the front has influenced Bannerman's thinking, too.
"I've had the opportunity to come to see that with my husband, who is just such a good and decent human being — the best human being that I know," Bannerman said. "The first-hand experience with my husband forced me to see if I was going to see him that way, then I have to see all of them that way."
Himes, the executive producer, is nervously waiting to see whether a public fed a steady diet of war headlines for two years running will respond to "Voices in Wartime."
And if they do, Himes, the activist, can only hope that they respond with the same level of engagement that people like Bannerman and Etheredge have shown, even if they don't share the same political leanings.
"This is part of the core of who I am," Himes said of his project, "what my life is about."
Tyrone Beason: 206-464-2251 or tbeason@seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
